Sin
by SeungSeiRan
Summary: When does a sin become a crime, he pondered. Reno x Tifa.


**I was in a ReTi mood today so I just thought I'd get off my lazy ass and... oh yeah, I'd like to dedicate this to The Sacred and Profane! Sorry I took so long!**

**Disclaimer: If I did own FF7, Cloud would forget about Aerith and shack up with Yuffie leaving Tifa to run in shock into the welcoming arms of a certain red-haired Turk.**

* * *

A sin is different from a crime. A crime is easier to commit. Especially since he'd never been much of stickler for rules. Words on a sheet of paper were practically _begging _to be ripped out and thrown into the air with careless abandon. Codes of conduct were only machinations of uptight crimps in stiff suits with little creativity of their own to share. An open mind is a dangerous mind, so they say. Reno was a lone wolf in a lone pack. Howling away to his own full moon, as loud and raucous as he wanted to sound. A red wolf knows no boundaries or limits, man-made or otherwise. It grins in bare-toothed viciousness at authority's lined and weary face.

A sin just sounds... sinful. The letter 's', so slithery and seductive in wanton strength. And seven sins at that. _Seven_...

Different as they are, they do go hand-in-hand. Wine and roses, sweat and blood, tears and rain. Perhaps they are the same really. Romance, passion, pain. The concept did indeed fascinate him. When does a sin become a crime and vice versa? It was a question he'd have to answer himself one day. Sooner or later, he'd plot and plan his ultimate downfall, erasing any existence of his stain on their lives. But that would wait another time...

Seven sins in one day. A new record at that.

**Sloth** had first kicked in at a shady, downtrodden bar in the slums. The alcohol was cheap and illegal. Smuggled in from the hidden valleys of a faraway mountain region now lost in the cloudy mists. Too much of a bad thing couldn't get any worse than it already was, he thought as he downed one glass after another, his previous idleness giving way to **gluttony**. The world seemed much nicer when he was drunk. Colors and shades of varying tints and hues melting into one another. Muddy greys and browns with splodges of neon yellows and oranges in the midst. As if he was in the inside of a tornado, so to say. Same thing kinda, sloth and gluttony. Each always lead to the other.

In a matter of a few blinks and stumbles, he'd found himself clutching his way through lamp-posts and letter-boxes through the streets of some place he couldn't fix a name on. No matter, he kept on lunging through annoyed pedestrians, grinning languidly at their frowns and clicking tongues. The earth-shattering migraine hit him before he hit the metal pillar, face first, in his path. Another sharp pain literally struck him at the back of his mind as he hit the concrete sidewalk.

A pair of wide-open eyes stuck themselves right in front of his own, curious and disbelieving. As soon as his vision came into focus, those eyes were snatched away by a hand that wasn't his with a light reprimand in a voice that he instantly recalled. He sat up and watched the little girl, her light brown hair held back in a pink ribbon, being lead away from him by a figure with long, dark hair hanging loose down her back. A few seconds later, Marlene Wallace and Tifa Lockhart were swallowed up by the swelling crowd. A few hours later, Reno found the latter hard at work behind the counter of a bar less notorious than the one he'd visited earlier.

She was too engrossed in her filling out orders to take note of his unexpected, not to mention often unwanted, appearance. He let his green eyes rove over the sparse traces of bare skin over her body, detailing every single square inch so that he'd be able to replay them to a mute yet jealous Rude sometime later tonight. Hair swept up and over one side, Tifa paid little heed to the Turk's motionless attentions even as they made eye-contact briefly, the irritated spark in her dark orbs remaining subdued, the sly gleeful one in his igniting.

**Lust** comes a-calling and he followed gladly.

An opportunity arose in the form of her naked arm reaching out beside him to pick up an empty glass left behind by a previous customer. Four long, spidery fingers and a thumb reached out, brushing skin on skin, causing her to withdraw her arm and gift him a resounding smack, reminding him about the last time when he'd dared gone 'too far' on her. This was embarrassingly tame compared to the one she'd given him when he'd placed a drunken, sloppy kiss on her cheek before leaving a few days ago.

But most of the intoxication had washed off since their previous encounter on the street. He was sober _enough_ now. Still, it wasn't enough that **greed** wouldn't settle into his system.

He hadn't known many women he could respect. His memory revealed no sign of a mother of any sort so maternal love was beyond his comprehension. Elena and Cissnei were the only females in his line of work with whom he'd had some sort of interaction with. He thought of the former as an eager little suck-up and whilst he had a degree of begrudging respect for the latter, it had never progressed any further.

Respect for Tifa wasn't begrudging. Then again, it wasn't 'respect' of the strictest kind. More of an 'understanding', sort of. Albeit, a one-sided affair on his part. Whilst he definitely wouldn't mind sneaking a peak at what she offered beneath the sheets, he wasn't ready for her to give in without a fight. She was... 'special' to him. Something of a prize he could win after much hard work. And he hated those last two words strung together. Or, maybe not a prize exactly... come to think of it, he wasn't sure that he _was_ really sure.

She was smiling. Tifa was smiling.

At Cloud Strife.

Here was where the **envy **came into play. It always _had _to be Spikey who showed up to save the day from the 'bad guys' like him. Brave and oh-so-heroic Cloud Strife with his humongous swords and 'issues'. The tragedy of it all. Did all women like such sops? Reno, for one, thought the swordsman better off alone, drowning in his sorrows with the ghosts of his two dead friends thrown in for company. The sop... so why was _he_, instead of Strife, the one receiving the tired looks from strangers?

Before Reno knew it, a jilted phrase was out of his mouth quicker than a bullet from a gun. It's short, sharp, and painful on his ears. Just like that, he'd given up his heart to her in a half-drunken, half-anguished plea for a fair shot. Just as easily, she threw it down on the floor and stepped on the pieces right before his very eyes. Strife glared and she coldly asked him to leave. His inner **pride** stubbornly refused to let go that easily. More words are exchanged, rat-tat-tat-tat!, like machine-gun fire before he was promptly picked up by the scruff of his neck and flung out into the street by that hulk of a human, Barret Wallace, who'd stepped in at the heat of the moment.

The pride rose to **wrath** within him, transforming him into a raging, screaming mess. An embittered wild wolf, cast out to the cold, howling at the moon and what fate refuses to grant him. The scene turns red, blood-red, as adrenalin and hate bathe him in fire and fury. The wailing in his head reached fever-pitch before it broke inside his ears, cooling down to a deathly silence.

He tasted blood on his lips from where it had streamed past from the cuts lining his face. Pieces of glass lay scattered around him, below broken windows and bottles. His shirt was drenched in sweat and littered with splinters of wood from those crates he'd broken. Relaxing his tensed muscles, he let the wounds on his arms and wrists drip onto the pavement, dotting them with red. Shiny drops of red...

He began to walk. Slow, achingly slow, not the loitering he preferred. Sinning was a harmful business in more ways than one.

When does a sin become a crime, he pondered.

Never, he answered. The only 'crime' he'd committed was against himself. A crime is a sin but a sin never a crime, oh no. That it may be, it wasn't set in stone. The only one he'd hurt this time was himself. For a sinner like him, that couldn't possibly be a crime...


End file.
